Probably a stupid question, but what is an RPM

I know it is a revolutions per minute, but what exactly is revolving 4000, 5000, 6000 etc per minute.

I want to get an idea of how hard my car is working.
Sorry for the newb question, but I always wondered that

 

The crankshaft

 

damn, that thing spins that many times....
these things are amazing

 

Yea, but what's really amazing is twinkies. What makes em last sooooooooo long?

 

RPM is revoloutions per minute.

It counts how many times the crankshaft makes one rotation. just remember your car redlines in the high 6000 area where as a car in Nascar red lines at high 9000 area and Bikes and F1 cars spin all the way up to 15,000 rpms. Now THAT is amazing!!!


Gray

 

And my Dremel spins at 35,000....a typical Supercharger spins at 45-60,000...

 

another piece of useless trivia - in a 4 cycle gasoline engine each spark plug fires half as many times per minute as the crankshaft is rotating (engine running @ 1500 RPM = plugs firing 750 times per minute)

Also, I think the camshaft turns at half the speed of the crankshaft (right??)

 

Yup, and so does the distributor. Well, not on an LS1 I guess(seeing as how we don't have one!).

 

Preservatives...and lots of 'em. They say after a nuclear war the only thing left alive will be cockroaches and twinkies-imagine that, huge mutated roaches eating twinkies and driving our cars around using our corpses as snack holders.

 

 

that was out or no where and ****** hilarious